The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  This anger eventually boiled over and, when an opportunity presented itself, the mutilated captive took sudden and terrible action. Seizing the lord of Châteauroux’s only son and heir, the prisoner dragged the boy ‘to the topmost crenellation of one of the towers’, locking all the doors behind him, and there ‘he stood outlined against the sky, threatening to throw the boy over’. The castle erupted in chaos as ‘everyone screamed in anguish’. According to Gerald:

  The boy’s father came running, and no one’s distress was greater than his. He made every offer he could think of in an attempt to obtain his son’s release. [But] the prisoner replied that he would not give the boy up until the father had first cut off his own testicles, [and though] the castellan went on with his appeals, they were all in vain.

  Struggling with this horrific dilemma, the lord of Châteauroux eventually resolved to feign agreement and beckoned an onlooker to deliver ‘a mighty blow [to his] lower body, to give the impression that he had mutilated himself’, while ‘all those present groaned’ at the sight. But the blind man was not so readily fooled. He called out, asking the castellan ‘where he felt the most pain’ and when the lord ‘replied falsely that it was in his loins’, the captive stepped forward, readying himself to push the boy over. The castellan had himself struck a second time and, in answer to the same question, claimed that ‘worst pain was in his heart’, but again he was not believed. By now, the blind man had dragged his hostage ‘to the very edge of the parapet’. Finally, the lord realised he could hesitate no longer:

  The third time, to save his son, the father really did cut off his own testicles. He shouted out that it was his teeth that hurt most. ‘This time I believe you,’ said the blind man, ‘and I know what I am talking about. Now I am avenged of the wrongs done to me, in part at least . . . You will never beget another son, and you shall certainly have no joy in this one.’

  With that, the blind man ‘hurled himself over the battlements . . . taking the boy with him’, and both died, their bodies broken by the dreadful fall. Gerald of Wales concluded this grim tale by noting that the lord of Châteauroux had a monastery built on the spot where the pair landed ‘to save his son’s soul’; a religious house that, supposedly, was still standing.

  Much of this story may be fantastical. Certainly its details cannot be verified in any other historical text and, in Gerald’s telling, its style echoes that popularised in miracle accounts – the difference being, of course, that here its conclusion brought not divine salvation, but death and despair. Nonetheless, Gerald expected the caustic, reciprocal violence that drove the action, and the central drama of a father’s love for his son, to ring true for his twelfth-century audience. This tale was designed to be believable. It has sometimes been suggested, therefore, that it demonstrates, in gruesome terms, precisely what a caring parent was willing to sacrifice for their child in the Middle Ages. Crucially, however, this insight needs to be refined. Gerald’s story was grounded in notions of patrilineal inheritance (through the male line) and the immense value accorded to sole surviving heirs. The father’s anguish, his willingness to suffer, and the depth of his eventual grief were all understood, precisely because the boy ‘was his only son’, never to be replaced. With his death a bloodline ended. As a younger son, William Marshal soon learnt that he might not be valued quite so highly.

  THE SIEGE OF NEWBURY

  It is likely that in his earliest years William enjoyed some of the comforts of childhood in an affluent noble household. This time was probably spent at the family estate at Hamstead Marshall, by now extended to include at least one timber-and-earth castle of the motte-and-bailey form – that is, with a raised earth mound (the motte) ringed by a ditch and a surrounding courtyard (the bailey) usually enclosed by a wooden palisade. Little would have been seen of his father John, but William seems to have forged a much stronger emotional connection with his mother, Sybil of Salisbury. This was not always the case, as noble and royal families frequently made use of wet-nurses, and it was common for these women to play a major role in a child’s upbringing. Richard the Lionheart – William’s contemporary and the future king of England – grew so fond of his wet-nurse, Hodierna, that he later rewarded her with gifts of land, and a small Wiltshire settlement, Knoyle Hodierne, came to bear her name. There may well have been opportunities for William to engage in the kind of simple, childish forms of play that would still be familiar to us today. Gerald of Wales, for one, recalled how, as a boy, he had played happily on the Pembrokeshire beaches of southwest Wales; there his brothers built sandcastles, while Gerald made sand-churches, seemingly already aware of his future career as an ecclesiastic. Children might also play with rudimentary toys, and these were often gendered, with boys receiving toy knights and doll’s houses given to girls.

  In 1152, however, at around the age of five, William Marshal’s childhood was violently interrupted in the last gasp of the civil war. The ferocity of the conflict had abated in the late 1140s, as it became apparent that the deadlock between Stephen and Matilda would not be broken by force alone. Now in his mid-fifties, Stephen remained king, but his position had been further undermined by events on the Continent. There Empress Matilda’s husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, used the distraction of England’s disorder to invade Normandy. By 1145 he had seized all of Stephen’s Norman lands and was declared duke of Normandy with the connivance of the French king. Geoffrey stopped short of leading his armies across the Channel to England in a direct intervention, but his occupation of Normandy nonetheless inflicted a mortal wound upon Stephen’s dynastic ambitions.

  Almost all of the king’s remaining supporters held land in both England and Normandy, and knew full well that steadfast support for Stephen’s line might cost them their valued Continental estates. A compromise was needed. The best prospect for a settlement was Matilda and Geoffrey’s eldest son, Henry. This redheaded, fiery tempered youth possessed a strong hereditary claim to the English crown through Matilda’s bloodline, and could rule as a male warrior-king in a manner that had always proved impossible for the empress. Henry had already visited England on three occasions, and when Geoffrey of Anjou conferred upon him the title of duke of Normandy, probably in January 1150, his prospects seemed virtually assured. All that remained was to push Stephen into a corner and either force a settlement or seize the crown outright.

  It was in these final years of manoeuvring that John Marshal overstepped the mark and came into direct conflict with the faltering king. Ever ambitious to extend his lordship and to expand his sphere of influence, John built a new fortified outpost. His aim appears to have been to assert a degree of control over a significant crossroads, where the route from London to the west intersected that running north–south between Oxford and Winchester. The exact position of this new stronghold is highly debateable. The History of William Marshal located it in Newbury (then a small town), but given the lack of any archaeological remains there, the castle may perhaps be identified with a sizeable motte that can still be found nestled atop a natural slope, less than a mile east of John’s existing castle at Hamstead Marshall.

  Determined to horde the last vestiges of his power, King Stephen decided to punish John’s presumption. In 1152 he marched on Newbury and laid siege to the Marshal’s new fortress with a sizeable army. John was not present at this point, and the lightly provisioned castle was under the command of his constable (the leading military officer of the Marshal’s household). Stephen struck hard and fast, offering bounteous riches to whoever breached the defences. This first, furious assault faltered, however, when the garrison threw ‘slabs of stone, sharpened stakes and massive pieces of timber’ down on the advancing enemy as they clambered ‘over the ditches and up the embankments’, and a lull in the fighting followed.

  Word of the siege now reached John Marshal, and he made a calculated decision. Using messengers, he established a line of communication with King Stephen and begged for a brief truce, probably on a promise of imminent surrender. Given hi
s reputation, John knew that his word alone would not be enough to secure terms. So, just as King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester had done in 1142, the Marshal offered up one of his sons as a hostage; the guarantor of good behaviour. He did not choose his eldest son by Sybil of Salisbury and namesake to fulfil this role, but rather his second (and, at this point, youngest) son, William. The boy was duly handed over to the king’s troops and Stephen withdrew a distance, so that the Marshal could parley with his constable and organise the castle’s capitulation. But, of course, the king had been deceived.

  The threat to William Marshal’s life

  The moment John gained access to Newbury castle he began hurried preparations for its renewed defence, installing ‘valiant knights, men-at-arms and archers’ – men who would be ‘unwilling to surrender’. As the History of William Marshal admitted, John ‘had no time for the idea of peace’ and this put his ‘child’s life in danger, because the king [soon] realised that he had been tricked’. The author of the History managed to steer an exceptionally agile path through this whole episode, describing events in close detail, yet never openly admonishing either John Marshal or King Stephen. Instead, when criticism did come, it was directed against the supposedly treacherous and cowardly advisors in Stephen’s inner circle – those described by the biographer as ‘losengiers’ or ‘deceivers’ – who now ‘stepped forward [and] advised the king to hang the child’. They were condemned as ‘wicked and base men’ for making this suggestion, yet remarkably, the biographer offered not a word of censure as he went on to describe how ‘news of all this reached [John], but he said that he did not care about the child, since he still had the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones’. Enraged at this affront and deception, Stephen ordered the young boy ‘to be seized and taken to the gallows for hanging’.

  So it was that William Marshal came face-to-face with death at the tender age of five. John’s apparently callous disregard for his son’s life might seem deplorable and, even in the twelfth century, it would have elicited a degree of shock. The use of one’s children as diplomatic hostages was commonplace in Western Europe; the act of forsaking a child in favour of military advantage was not. John had a proven track record of duplicity, so the very fact that King Stephen accepted young William as surety for his father’s good faith shows that the provision of such a hostage was deemed a categorical guarantee of fidelity. William may not have been that most prized of offspring, the first-born legitimate son, but he was John’s blood kin nonetheless. No one could have expected him to be discarded in this hard-hearted manner.

  It is possible, of course, that John Marshal took a calculated risk with William’s life. Ever since the events at Exeter, back in 1136, Stephen had been regarded as a clement monarch. Time after time, he had failed to act with ruthless resolve. Perhaps John judged that his ageing king would never bring himself to kill a boy in cold blood. If so, this was a terrible gamble. Siege warfare was a brutish, grinding business during the Middle Ages; one in which the battle for morale was everything. In this era, armies on both sides of a siege routinely perpetrated acts of atrocity in order to intimidate their opponents or to force surrender. A defending garrison might hang the mutilated corpses of captured attackers from the walls, or dismember bodies and fling limbs and heads back over the battlements. Besiegers often threatened to hang or butcher prisoners in plain view of a garrison and, as the case of Robert FitzHubert at Devizes attested, such threats were usually acted upon. Considering the events of 1152 in this context, it is clear that while John Marshal might have hoped, even suspected, that his son would survive, this outcome was by no means a certainty. In essence, the Marshal had decided that success at Newbury was worth more than young William’s safety.

  In the days that followed, it seems that William Marshal’s life was endangered not just once, but on three separate occasions. He was threatened first with hanging, then led to a catapult to be cast into the fortress so as ‘to strike fear into [the defenders’] hearts’, and finally prepared for use as a human shield during a frontal assault on the walls, where he faced being ‘squashed to a pulp’. William’s mother, Sybil of Salisbury, was said to have ‘experienced such great pain’ and anxiety through this period, because she believed that her young son was doomed to endure ‘atrocious suffering’. But throughout, Newbury’s garrison remained resolute in their refusal to surrender. How then did the boy survive?

  The only answer is provided by the History of William Marshal, the sole surviving source to preserve a record of these events. Its author evidently drew upon the oral tradition of William’s own recollections of Newbury. According to this account, his simple, unmannered innocence stayed the king’s hand, time after time: asking to play with a guard’s spear, as he was led to the gallows; or happily preparing to hop into the catapult’s sling, thinking it to be a child’s swing. Charmed by this boy, Stephen halted the execution, apparently declaring that ‘anyone who could ever allow him to die in such agony would certainly have a very cruel heart’.

  Later, as the siege continued, William and the king were even said to have played a game of ‘knights’ together in the royal tent, using flower stems as mock swords. Though unharmed, the boy remained a crown hostage for many months, quite probably more than a year. Newbury eventually succumbed to the king’s forces, though John Marshal avoided capture, and Stephen moved north-east to invest the major opposition-held castle at Wallingford. From this point on, negotiations to end the civil war began in earnest, and terms were finally agreed at Winchester on 6 November 1153: Stephen was to remain king, but would be succeeded by Empress Matilda’s son, Henry, duke of Normandy. It was only after peace had been settled that William Marshal was returned to his family. Tellingly, the History noted that ‘William returned to his father’ and added that ‘his mother was overjoyed to see him’, yet made no reference to John Marshal’s reaction.

  The impact of William Marshal’s early childhood

  In spite of this apparent emotional detachment, John Marshal seems to have loomed large in William’s memory. As a father, he may have been a distant figure – encountered only fleetingly during the boy’s early childhood, and even then at arm’s length – but there is an inescapable sense that John left an imprint. His image – as the grizzled, hard-bitten veteran of the civil war, his face disfigured by burns, one eye a ruin – was seared into the verses of the History of William Marshal, a text which often relied upon William’s own memories.

  In later life, William seems to have admired many of his father’s supposed qualities, picturing him as a fearsome warrior and devoted royal servant, but also as a shrewd and ambitious warlord, beloved by his followers. How much William knew or understood of John’s political machinations during the civil war, or his ruthless treatment of rivals such as Robert FitzHubert, remains unclear. On the surface at least, William appears to have forgiven his father for the cold-hearted decision he made during the siege of Newbury. As an adult, William evidently relished the story of his captivity and early brush with death, enjoying this self-deprecating tale of a boy discarded by his father, replete with instructive lessons about cunning and honour. It may almost have acquired the status of a foundation myth – in the course of his long career, Marshal would rise to unimaginable heights, yet he could always remind those around him that he had almost been executed by a king when just a boy.

  There is no way of knowing whether the actual experience of being a hostage and facing the threat of death – or, perhaps more importantly, his subsequent reflection upon these events – left any enduring psychological marks. Perhaps the repeated telling of the tale represented some form of defence mechanism or coping device, but William may equally have judged his father’s actions, and his own predicament, as a natural consequence of medieval war. It is notable, however, that in later years William never placed his own kin, nor even his knights and retainers, in such a position of forsaken peril.

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  THE PATH TO KNIGHTHOOD

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sp; The first years following young William Marshal’s release from captivity passed in relative peace, as England finally moved beyond the destructive era of civil war. The truce agreed at Winchester held and, for a brief time, King Stephen was able to reassert some semblance of royal authority within his realm. Nearing sixty, Stephen was an old man by the standards of the day, yet even so, his death came unexpectedly. On 25 October 1154, he was struck down by what one contemporary described as ‘a violent pain in his gut, followed by a flow of blood’, and passed away that same night. The duke of Normandy’s accession followed as planned, with the twenty-one-year-old Angevin crowned and anointed as King Henry II on 19 December 1154.