The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  The first real test of his mettle came in the summer of 1136, when a minor rebellion broke out in the far south-west of England. Stephen moved quickly to contain this insurrection, laying close siege to the malcontents holed up in Exeter Castle. After three months their resistance was broken, and an abject surrender was offered. Every expectation was that the rebels would face stern retribution, ranging from the confiscation of lands and imprisonment, to physical mutilation, perhaps even death. In similar situations King Henry I had been merciless. Renowned by one contemporary as ‘an implacable enemy to the disloyal’, he proved willing to use gruesome punishments against his adversaries and rivals, such as blinding and castration; abhorrent measures that nonetheless caused him to be revered as a ‘lion of justice’.

  King Stephen lacked the stomach for such pitiless brutality. Following the counsel of Robert of Gloucester – who must surely have known that he was encouraging Stephen to undermine the crown’s authority – the king showed astonishing leniency at Exeter, allowing the dissenters to leave unharmed, with their freedom and possessions. Most treated this as a grave sign of weakness, and from then on serious questions were asked about Stephen’s competence, for it was obvious that this king could be challenged without fear of full reprisal. One chronicler noted that Stephen soon earned a troubling reputation as ‘a mild man [who] did not exact the full penalties of the law’. By the summer of 1138 Robert of Gloucester felt confident enough to head up his own revolt, openly declaring support for the cause of his half-sister Empress Matilda.

  As Stephen’s grip on the reins of power faltered, Empress Matilda became emboldened. Her claim to the crown, so widely disdained in 1135, was resurrected, and in 1139 she crossed the Channel, establishing a power base at Bristol alongside the earl of Gloucester. From this point onwards, the realm split roughly down the middle, with the heartland of the king’s supporters being in the south-east, and Matilda and Earl Robert holding the south-west.

  THE CIVIL WAR

  For the next fourteen years the kingdom was blighted by a destructive and intractable internecine conflict, in which neither side proved capable of achieving overall victory. Stephen clung to his status as England’s anointed monarch, yet the weakness and innate incompetence of his reign had been exposed. Meanwhile, though Matilda’s lineage suggested she was legally entitled to rule, her gender and marriage remained problematic, and her haughty and imperious demeanour seems to have alienated many in England, further damaging her prospects. The convoluted struggle between Stephen and Matilda was marked by some extraordinary twists in fortune, and punctuated by acts of fortitude and folly. It also offered a man of John Marshal’s character, temperament and ambition manifold opportunities. When hostilities broke out, he was ideally placed to exploit the conflict, holding a position in the West Country between the two camps, frequently playing one side against the other.

  The History of William Marshal described this period in some detail, but its account was sometimes garbled and always biased in John Marshal’s favour. He was characterised as a ‘courtly, wise and worthy man’ and ‘a brave and trustworthy knight’; just the kind of generous and admirable figure that other warriors might happily follow, even though he was ‘no earl and no baron with fabulous wealth’. In reality, John’s loyalties may have been far from certain, especially in the civil war’s early stages, yet the History maintained that ‘the worthy Marshal entirely threw his lot in with the rightful heir’ Matilda from the start.

  At times, the History inflated John’s significance to an almost laughable degree. According to the biographer, ‘King Stephen had the worst of it’ during the war, primarily because John chose to support Empress Matilda, and John was said to have suffered ‘many a combat and battle . . . many a trial and tribulation on her behalf . . . before things were settled’. In truth, the Marshal remained a relatively minor player in the grand scheme of the overall struggle, but it is impossible to know if this overblown representation derived primarily from William Marshal’s own personal recollections, or whether his biographer himself consciously sought to embroider William’s ancestry.

  One dramatic story of John’s heroism, recorded in the History, certainly had the flavour of a well-worn family legend that wove together strands of fact and fiction. It was set against the backdrop of a significant crisis in 1141. For a brief period that year, Matilda’s faction appeared to be on the brink of victory, after Stephen was taken captive during a skirmish outside Lincoln. The king was led in humiliation to Bristol and placed in chains. In September, however, the tables were turned. Matilda and Robert of Gloucester had besieged Winchester, hoping to press home their advantage, but were caught by a relieving army loyal to Stephen. In the course of a frantic retreat westwards, the earl fought a gallant rearguard action at the Stock bridge ford of the River Test that allowed Matilda to make good her escape, but which led to Robert’s own capture. A deal eventually was struck that saw King Stephen regain his freedom in exchange for Robert’s own release. Not surprisingly, an atmosphere of intense suspicion and recrimination surrounded the whole affair, with both men having to provide hostages, including their respective sons, as guarantee that the terms of the trade would be honoured.

  In the History’s account of Matilda’s perilous flight from Winchester in 1141, John Marshal appeared as the central protagonist, and Earl Robert of Gloucester was erased. Thus John was depicted as the empress’s only reliable advisor, counselling immediate retreat. It was he who told Matilda to stop slowing their flight by riding side-saddle ‘as women do’; supposedly insisting (with a wry hint of bawdiness) that instead she ‘put [her] legs apart’ to ride like a man. And in the History it was John, not Earl Robert, who then fought a valiant last stand to cover her retreat, though at a ford in Wherwell, not Stockbridge, which was five miles to the south.

  From here, however, the tale began to trace a more believable path, partially corroborated by other contemporary evidence. It appears that John Marshal did indeed fight on behalf of Matilda’s forces near the nunnery at Wherwell in 1141, and when overwhelmed by enemy numbers, took sanctuary within its abbey church. King Stephen’s supporters promptly set fire to the entire structure and, as the flames spread, searing heat caused the church’s lead roof to melt. According to the History this burning metal ‘fell on the Marshal’s face, with horrible consequences’, charring his flesh and costing him an eye. Left for dead, John eventually stumbled out of the smoking ruin and, despite his grievous wounds, managed to walk to safety.

  John Marshal’s character

  Intermittent and inconclusive fighting continued in the years that followed, with neither side able to achieve telling gains. But John Marshal thrived in the midst of this unrest. Even the History of William Marshal occasionally hinted at the darker facets of John’s involvement in the civil war. His capacity for ruthless brutality was glimpsed in the description of a dawn ambush, unleashed against a lightly armoured enemy force near Winchester. The biographer proudly declared that ‘no lion ever ran after its prey so [swiftly] as did those who were armed after those who were unarmed’, adding that ‘many a man [was] killed and maimed, many a brain spilled from skull and many a gut [left] trailing on the ground’. The stark reality was that the exploitation of weakness became commonplace during this anarchic period of English history. This was a time of wolves, when aggressive, despotic and devious warlords thrived. The author of the History of William Marshal may not have been comfortable admitting it, but John possessed all of these qualities in abundance.

  Other chroniclers, who actually lived through the civil war, brought the Marshal’s character into clearer focus. In the most antagonistic accounts he was portrayed as a ‘scion of hell and the root of all evil, [who] troubled the kingdom by unceasing disorder’; a man who built castles ‘of wondrous design’, but then used them to impose his own tyrannical authority over the land, extorting money and property from the Church. Elsewhere John emerged as just one more brutish, grasping player in a desperately ch
aotic game. This was never more apparent than in one telling incident in the earliest phase of the civil war that was wholly ignored by the History of William Marshal.

  In early spring 1140, Robert FitzHubert, a Flemish mercenary who had sought employ on both sides of the conflict, decided to seize a portion of land for himself. FitzHubert had a particularly unsavoury reputation, being described by one contemporary as ‘a man of great cruelty and unequalled in wickedness and crime’. Rumour had it that he liked to strip his captives naked, slather them in honey and then leave them to be tormented by stinging insects. He was also heard to boast of having watched in glee as eighty monks trapped inside a flaming church in Flanders burned to death.

  On the night of 26 March, FitzHubert led a stealthy assault on the stout royal castle at Devizes in Wiltshire, scaling the walls using makeshift ladders in the hope of capturing the fortress before any alarm could be raised. Night-time raids of this type were incredibly risky affairs, and rare in the Middle Ages, because coordinating such an offensive in near pitch-darkness was virtually impossible. The chances of an attacking force being detected, isolated and then butchered were high. On this occasion, however, FitzHubert succeeded. The guards were bypassed and the bulk of the garrison, then ‘enjoying untroubled sleep’, quickly overwhelmed. In theory at least, FitzHubert had been acting as the earl of Gloucester’s agent up to this point, but now he promptly declared his intention to hold Devizes for himself – the mercenary planned to turn himself into a Wiltshire warlord.

  However, Robert FitzHubert then made the mistake of contacting John Marshal. The latter’s stronghold at Marlborough lay just fourteen miles to the north-east, across an open and eerie landscape, littered with ancient burial mounds and stone circles – remnants of a forgotten Neolithic age. FitzHubert proposed a parley with his new neighbour, though his precise intentions are impossible to divine. Perhaps he hoped to propose some form of alliance, or expected to scare John into submission with threats of violence. The talks may even have been a ruse, simply designed to gain FitzHubert and his men access to Marlborough Castle, whereupon the fortress might be snatched from the Marshal’s unsuspecting hands. Whatever scheme was entertained, it is clear that Robert FitzHubert badly misjudged John’s character.

  The latter readily agreed to a meeting, welcoming the mercenary and a portion of his men into Marlborough. Yet the moment they entered the castle, the trap was sprung. As the gates slammed shut behind them, the visitors were surrounded, disarmed and taken captive. Having outwitted FitzHubert, John threw him ‘in a narrow dungeon to suffer hunger and tortures’. The Marshal seems to have hoped somehow to use his new prisoner as leverage in order to gain Devizes for himself. The treacherous mercenary was first handed over to the earl of Gloucester in return for a payment of 500 marks, then later dragged down to Devizes, paraded in full view of the castle’s garrison and threatened with death unless his men within surrendered. When they staunchly refused, FitzHubert was duly strung up and, in the words of William of Malmesbury, ‘hanged like a common criminal’. In the chronicler’s opinion, this was a just end for such a ‘sacrilegious wretch’, while John Marshal, it was concluded, had shown himself to be ‘a man of surprising subtlety’.

  The union of the Marshal and Salisbury families

  Through such machinations, John angled for advantage throughout the civil war. In reality, he was neither the grand hero of this protracted conflict, nor its arch villain – merely an ambitious, minor nobleman: canny, occasionally unscrupulous and certainly willing to exploit the turmoil around him in order to climb the ladder. Not all of the Marshal’s schemes succeeded. In the mid-1140s, John came into conflict with one of Wiltshire’s most powerful families: the lords of Salisbury. The head of this dynasty, Earl Patrick of Salisbury, ruled over one of the region’s major fortified towns (now know as Old Sarum), and his loyalties had also shifted in the course of the ‘anarchy’.

  The quarrel between these two West Country warlords seems to have been sparked by John’s attempts to expand his sphere of influence eastwards at Salisbury’s expense, with the construction of a small fortress at Ludgershall. When an angry feud erupted, punctuated by raiding and bloody skirmishes, it became clear that the Marshal had met his match. The details of the entire affair are decidedly murky, but it seems that John was eventually forced to back down and agreed to make some form of submission to Earl Patrick. However, the episode did have one concrete, and quite momentous, consequence. John agreed to bind himself in alliance to Patrick of Salisbury’s family through an arranged marriage.

  The Marshal already had a wife in Adelina, but this problem was readily overcome. In the twelfth century, an increasingly censorious Western Church sought to tightly regulate the practice of marriage. To avoid any possibility of incestuous union, weddings between members of the same family, up to the degree of sixth cousins, were officially forbidden. In reality, this prohibition proved largely unenforceable, given the labyrinthine web of intermarriage and kinship that bound together Europe’s aristocracy. For many, finding a spouse who was not, in some distant manner, a relation was virtually impossible. But this did mean that, when necessary, bloodlines could be perused and an illicit degree of consanguinity declared as grounds for annulment. This seems to have been the method employed to sever John’s tie to Adelina (and she soon remarried a minor Oxfordshire noble). Meanwhile, the Marshal wed Earl Patrick’s sister, Sybil. This union proved to be an effective means of reconciliation. It brought the feud to a decisive end, enhanced John’s social standing and, before long, produced a succession of new heirs. In all, Sybil gave birth to seven of John’s children: four sons and three daughters. The second-born of these, a boy, appeared around 1147. He was given the name William.

  THE EXPERIENCE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

  Nothing certain is known of William Marshal’s earliest years, beyond the simple fact that he survived them. In the mid-twelfth century that in itself was no mean feat. Estimates suggest that in this period at least a third of children died within a year of birth, and perhaps as many as another third failed to reach puberty. The vast majority of these children seem to have been lost to disease and illness, though their susceptibility to these causes of death were gravely exacerbated by deficiencies in diet, living conditions and medical care. Of course, as the son of a nobleman, William’s lot was better than most, but that advantage was at least partially offset by the strife-ridden world into which he emerged.

  Parents in the Middle Ages were only too aware that their children might die before reaching adulthood. They must have possessed a sense of mortality’s proximity, even probability, starkly divorced from that experienced by mothers and fathers in much of the modern world. For this reason, it used to be fashionable to suggest that most medieval parents could not possibly have forged close bonds with their offspring. Through the basic expedient of emotional self-preservation, it was thought, parents would have maintained a detached relationship with their children, perhaps even routinely exposing them to neglect. At first glance, this conclusion appears to be supported by the evidence preserved in medieval coroners’ records and collections of so-called ‘miracle stories’ – the popular tales of divine intervention, usually involving Christian saints, that were produced in their thousands in this period. This material throws up frequent stories of accidental death or injury involving children that suggest lack of care and supervision: those who fell down wells, drowned in rivers or were trampled by horses, for example. To this could be added instances of bewilderingly bizarre medical practice bordering on wilful mistreatment. The famous eleventh-century canon lawyer, Burchard of Worms, for one, complained that some parents sought to ‘cure’ children suffering from a fever either by leaving them exposed on a roof, or by placing them in an oven – the underlying suggestion being that this was deliberate infanticide. Should we then conclude that, in William Marshal’s day, few parents cherished their children; that he would have experienced little more than disregard in his first years?

&nb
sp; In truth, the nature of our surviving sources means that the emotional landscape of this era will never be fully reconstructed, and the quality and depth of love or grief experienced within families remains uncertain. Nonetheless, more recent research suggests that parents living nine hundred years ago did treasure their offspring in much the same way as we do today. After all, there is a real danger in extrapolating generalised conclusions from self-selecting evidence, like coroners’ reports, that naturally dealt with life’s bleaker occurrences, and miracle stories, which traded in the shocking and the dramatic. A broader search indicates that many parents felt fear and anguish when their children were ill, and suffered intense anguish if a child died. This emotion might be expressed by a mother tearing her hair from her head and beating herself, or by a father literally paralysed with grief. Indeed, from the twelfth century onwards, the Church sought to counsel parents against ‘excessive’ mourning for lost children, on the grounds that it implied a lack of faith in God’s will – a move which must indicate that these emotions were widely experienced.

  For all this, there were, it seems, subtle, but significant differences in the forms of attachment made with infants and children in this period, as opposed to our own. An array of evidence suggests that parents experienced a deeper and more profound sense of sorrow at the loss of an only, or sole surviving child. This appears to have been because offspring were highly valued, at least in part because of their potential to act as successors and continuators of a bloodline. Thus, the death of a last heir – particularly that of a male – was keenly felt.

  The lord of Châteauroux

  This sentiment found powerful expression in a striking tale related by the twelfth-century polymath Gerald of Wales – a famous churchman and author of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries – who was fascinated by everything from history to geography and the natural world. Gerald’s story was centred upon the castle of Châteauroux, in the lawless region of Berry (in central France) – a stronghold that would have a close connection to William Marshal’s own career. According to Gerald of Wales, its ruthless castellan took one of his enemies captive and, so as to ensure that he posed no further threat, had the poor wretch blinded and castrated. These were vicious punishments, yet not unknown in this brutal age; deeds guaranteed to strip a man of his own potency and to snuff out any prospect of a vengeful heir being fathered. Thus emasculated, the man remained a prisoner for many years, but was given the freedom to roam the fortress, crawling and stumbling as he went. In time, however, he ‘committed to memory all [its] passageways and even the steps which led up to the towers’, and through all these long days, forgotten and ignored by those around him, the man nursed his cold hatred.