The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  Possessed of boundless energy and ambition, Henry would become one of medieval England’s greatest monarchs, and a central figure in William Marshal’s life. Henry was said to have been a man of medium height, with close-cropped red hair (which lightened over the years) and piercing blue-grey eyes that were ‘dove-like when he [was] at peace’, but which gleamed ‘like fire when his temper [was] aroused’. The young king founded a new royal line – the Angevin dynasty – and the majesty and magnitude of his realm eclipsed that of his Anglo-Norman predecessors.* This Angevin world, likened by some to a new empire stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees, would be the setting for William’s extraordinary career.

  Virtually nothing is known of William’s remaining childhood years. Having recounted the intense drama of Newbury’s siege, the History passed over the rest of the 1150s in silence. But young Marshal must have settled back into life in England’s West Country, alongside his family. By 1160, William was growing into the man he would become. His biographer later declared that ‘it did not take long before [he developed] into a tall boy’ (though, given that the average adult male height in the twelfth century has been estimated at five-foot-seven, he is unlikely to have stood above six feet) and added that ‘his body was so well-fashioned that, even if he had been created by the sculptor’s chisel, his limbs would not have been so handsome’. William was said to have had ‘fine feet and hands’, brown hair, a swarthy complexion and ‘a crotch so large . . . that no noble could be his peer’, though, almost certainly, this referred to the width of his hips and natural predisposition for the horse saddle. In short, the Marshal could easily have been mistaken for a noble Roman emperor of old. Seemingly conscious that the accuracy of this grandiose description might be doubted, the History’s author added that ‘I can tell you this because I saw [William’s features] and remember them well’, though in truth he can only have encountered Marshal as a much older man.

  Regardless of his appearance and physique, there can have been little expectation that young William would enjoy a storied future, filled with fame, glory and fortune. As the lesser son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, he might hope to live a relatively comfortable life (by the standards of the day), but achieve little distinction. William’s lowly position within his own family’s hierarchy was made painfully apparent in a legal document drafted in 1158. In this charter, detailing the sale of Marshal land in Somerset, he was named alongside his mother, two half-brothers and his elder brother John. William appeared at the bottom of this list, and while his siblings gained certain benefits as part of the arrangement – a horse or some coin – he received nothing. It was John, the first-born child from the marriage to Sybil of Salisbury, who was expected to inherit his father’s lands and the office of royal master-marshal (though by this stage the marshalcy was merely an honorific title, with the real work at court performed by a paid administrator).

  Unusually for this period, the one thing William did take from his family was the appellation ‘Marshal’, even though the formal title would be held by his brother for decades to come. ‘Marshal’ seems to have been adopted as an early form of surname – a rare occurrence in an era when most were identified either by their place of birth, residence or lordship; through their relationship to a parent (King Henry II actually styled himself as Henry FitzEmpress, meaning ‘son of the Empress’, for most of his life); or through some notable physical characteristic (hence the famously corpulent King Louis VI of France became widely known as Louis the Fat).

  With little more than his name to fall back on, William’s prospects depended on his education. Some living in the twelfth century argued that an individual’s fate and future were sealed at birth, with no chance of alteration. The famous holy woman Hildegard of Bingen maintained, for example, that a boy conceived on the twentieth day after a full moon was destined to become a robber and a murderer. But most placed increasing emphasis on the value of learning, training and apprenticeship. It became common in this period for noble-born boys to be purposefully removed from the comforts of home and packed off to live with a distant relative – a practice akin to toughening up children by dispatching them to a distant boarding school. As a boy, King Henry II himself had spent two years in Bristol under the tutelage of his half-uncle Earl Robert of Gloucester. The normal age for this separation was around eight, yet William Marshal was twelve or thirteen before any arrangements were made on his behalf. Some of this delay may be explained by a waning in his father John Marshal’s fortunes. The end of the civil war curtailed John’s ability to manoeuvre for advantage, and he failed to find lasting favour under the new monarch Henry II. John retained his marshalcy, but the cornerstone of his power in the West Country, the guardianship of Marlborough Castle, was reapportioned in 1158.

  Eventually, in around 1160, John secured a position for his son in Normandy with the notable baron, William of Tancarville, though Sybil’s maternal influence may well have been at work given that the lord of Tancarville was her kinsman. So it was that, as William Marshal entered his teenage years, he set off for northern France, seeking in the words of the History ‘to win an honourable reputation’. On the day of his departure, William’s family gathered together to say their farewells (though, as always, his father was absent). There was no elaborate and richly endowed entourage to accompany him on his way, just a solitary servant. According to his biographer, William’s ‘mother wept tears of distress’ at this parting, as did his siblings. This journey away from the familiar world of his birth and childhood must have been unsettling – in the intensely localised society of medieval Europe, many lived out their days without ever travelling more than a day’s journey from home. Yet William’s future now lay in Normandy, some 150 miles to the south, and the journey there required him to cross the English Channel.

  WITH THE ‘FATHER OF KNIGHTS’

  William Marshal lived through the era of the great Anglo-Norman and Angevin realms, in which English kings and their leading subjects held land on both sides of the Channel. This made travel between England and the Continent a frequent necessity of life and, in the years to come, William would sail over the Channel dozens of times. Yet the voyage remained a dangerous and unpredictable affair. It often involved navigating more than seventy miles across open water (between the likes of Portsmouth and Barfleur), a far cry from the meagre twenty-one miles needed to traverse the Channel at its narrowest point between Dover and medieval French ports like Wissant (near modern-day Calais). The relatively rudimentary nature of medieval ship and sail design also meant that seafarers routinely found themselves at the mercy of the elements, praying for calm seas and favourable winds. Shipwrecks were alarmingly common – indeed, it has been estimated that, in the mid-twelfth century, more royal courtiers died from drowning than through fighting for the crown – so few made this journey without a degree of trepidation. On this first occasion, Marshal’s crossing passed without incident, but he would not always be so fortunate.

  William thus arrived in Normandy: a land far from home, but also the land of his forefathers. Despite his upbringing, there is little chance that he thought of himself – in terms of culture, identity and loyalty – as English. By birth, Marshal was a Norman. Certainly his first language would have been a Norman dialect of medieval northern French, though it is possible that his West Country heritage left a mark on his accent.* Much of his career, from this point forward, would be spent in Normandy, and he developed a deep affinity for the region and a particular familiarity with the area north and east of the River Seine, known as Upper Normandy, where the open, rolling terrain was not dissimilar to that of Wiltshire.

  It was there that Marshal found the imposing Norman castle at Tancarville, perched on a rocky bluff above the northern banks of the Seine estuary. Today this is the site of a sprawling, derelict French château, its crumbling structures accumulated over the centuries, through many disparate stages of building, but when William arrived it boasted a formidable stone keep. Its lord, William of Tanc
arville, was a figure of considerable standing and reputation – described by one contemporary as ‘a man noble in race, unique in war-craft, splendid in strength, in worth a very death to the envious’, He possessed two further strongholds in the duchy and held the office of chamberlain of Normandy in hereditary right.

  William Marshal came to join his household with one particular purpose in mind. As a younger son, William might perhaps have followed the path set by the likes of King Stephen’s brother, Henry of Blois, and pursued a career in the Church. The course set before young William led in a different direction. He had arrived at Tancarville, aged around thirteen, to acquire skill at arms: to learn the business of war and ultimately to join the ranks of Europe’s new military elite by becoming a knight.

  The evolution of medieval knighthood

  Knights are central to our popular conception of the Middle Ages. The iconic image of a noble warrior, clad in resplendent armour, racing astride his charger to rescue an imperilled damsel is the classic medieval cliché. It would be easy to imagine then, that knights were an essential, constant and unchanging feature of this distant era; that everyone living in Western Europe 1,000 years ago understood exactly what a knight was, and knew precisely how one should behave.

  Knights did play a crucial role in shaping this period of history, and some, though not all, of their practices and beliefs conformed to modern expectations. But the concept of knighthood only began to emerge in the second half of the eleventh century and it remained in its infancy even as William Marshal arrived at Tancarville and grew towards manhood. William lived through the precise period in which the ideas, rituals and customs of knighthood coalesced. Indeed, his own celebrated career as one of Europe’s greatest knights helped to mould this warrior class.

  In its most basic form, a medieval knight was simply a mounted warrior. Men had fought on horseback for more than a millennium, but in the course of the early Middle Ages, horsemanship came to be regarded as an essential aristocratic pastime – the badge of nobility. From the ninth century onwards, as the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (Charles the Great) and his successors sought to re-forge the Roman Empire in the West, men of power were expected to own and to ride horses. By around the year 1000 CE, the speed and manoeuvrability of horse-borne soldiers started to play an increasingly decisive role in warfare, and a more distinctive breed of fighter slowly emerged through the eleventh century.

  Typically, these horsemen joined the military entourages of warlords, counts, dukes, even kings. At first most came simply for pay, but over time they began to hope for greater rewards for their service, including land. Written sources of the time reflected the appearance of these first ‘knights’ through the use of more specific language, though the terminology employed to identify these warriors was frustratingly vague and inconsistent. In Latin they might be described either as ‘equites’ (horsemen) or ‘milites’ (soldiers), in French as ‘ chevaliers’ (horsemen) and in German and Anglo-Saxon as ‘knecht’ or ‘cnihtas’ (servants), from which the modern English word ‘knight’ was derived. Such imprecision reflected the embryonic nature of this military cadre. By the start of the twelfth century, the two concepts – of horsemen as aristocratic and of mounted warriors as a martial elite – were thoroughly intermingled. Certainly there was a natural assumption that any male noble (other than a cleric) would fight as a mounted warrior or ‘knight’, and by extension, an emerging sense that the very practice of knighthood might imbue a degree of nobility upon an individual. Nonetheless, aristocratic birth was not a prerequisite for entry into this warrior class.

  Throughout the early twelfth century the essential markers of knighthood remained practical. These elite warriors were readily identified by their use of a specific range of equipment and weaponry. Every knight possessed a horse and a sword, but the majority also used a lance, armour and a shield. By the time William Marshal arrived in Normandy, knighthood was becoming an increasingly rarefied profession. The fundamental tools of the trade cost a small fortune to buy and maintain. Warhorses in particular were cripplingly expensive, with an initial outlay of around four or five times what an average knight might live on in a year.

  Learning to ride a mount in battle and to wield weaponry with a measure of proficiency also took hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours of practice – time not available to all. Not surprisingly, knighthood became the preserve of the privileged few. One had to be born to wealth or find a generous patron. By and large, William Marshal fitted into the second category. He came to Normandy seeking education and training, but also the patronage of a wealthy noble willing to bankroll his endeavours. Luckily for him, the lord of Tancarville was renowned for the size and the quality of his military retinue and known to contemporaries as a ‘father of knights’, and he welcomed William into the fold.

  By the mid-twelfth century, Western society was developing a clearer sense of the rituals and obligations associated with knighthood. Two fundamental concepts would already have been at the forefront of William’s mind when he set foot in Tancarville Castle. The nature and full significance of these ideas are not easily explained, because the two medieval French terms used to denote them – mesnie and preudhomme – have no exact translation in modern English. But these notions were at the forefront of William’s mind through his teenage years and beyond.

  The mesnie was the retinue of knights who gathered around a lord – the tightknit group of warriors serving as elite troops and trusted bodyguards. In many cases the knights in a noble’s mesnie became like members of his extended family – steadfast supporters and valued advisors. The sense of an intimate community was conveyed by the word mesnie because it derived from the Latin term mansio (household) and could be used interchangeably with another Latin word familia (military household). Crucially, the concept of the mesnie imposed a degree of obligation on both parties involved. Knights served their lord, fighting in the field, showing allegiance and fidelity, but in return a noble was expected to shelter his warriors, protecting their status and advancing their careers. In real terms, this meant not only paying for a knight’s living costs and funding the upkeep of their equipment, arms and horses; it could also involve rewards of land and title, even the arrangement of an advantageous marriage. This reciprocity also extended into the sphere of status. A knight’s standing naturally was increased by entering the mesnie of a mighty baron or a member of a royal dynasty. But in the course of the twelfth century, increasing emphasis was placed upon the public display of military retinues as markers of power. In William’s day, the size of your mesnie mattered and great nobles vied to be seen surrounded by tens, even hundreds of knights.

  William harboured potent memories of his father’s own mesnie. The History of William Marshal recalled that John Marshal ‘surrounded himself with many worthy men’, noting that the knights in his mesnie were ‘in his pay’, but adding that they were also ‘all wearing livery supplied by him’ and their mounts had ‘horseshoes, nails, livery [all] paid for by him’. The History concluded that ‘[John] was able to do this’ even though he was no mighty baron, because he understood the value of generosity and so ‘knew how to attract and hold on to valiant knights’. The concept of the mesnie would play a crucial role in William Marshal’s career as he served first in a number of retinues and then assembled his own.

  His notion of knighthood, and that entertained by the society around him, was also profoundly shaped by the archetype of the preudhomme – the ideal warrior, literally the ‘best kind of a man’. By the mid-twelfth century, worthy knights were increasingly expected to display the ‘right stuff’, to conform to an evolving code of behaviour. An admirable and respected warrior – a preudhomme – was skilled in combat and courageous, faithful, wise and able to give good counsel, but also canny, even wily, in war when necessary. He was the exact opposite of the type of serpent-tongued deceivers (or losengiers) who had tried to persuade King Stephen to execute young William back in 1152 – men of dubious loyalty and questiona
ble judgement. William arrived at Tancarville hoping to become a preudhomme. Indeed, in many respects his life served to define that archetype.

  The history of knighthood – real and imagined

  William Marshal’s sense of what might be expected of a knight, and how such a warrior might behave, were also informed both by actual recent history and an imaginary pseudo-historical past, woven out of myth and half-remembered fact. A century earlier, the knights who were his Norman forebears had been little more than mercenaries: men who used their martial skill to accrue wealth and land in the service of lords such as William the Conqueror, and whose conduct was primarily conditioned by self-interest. In the course of the eleventh century, however, the Roman (or Latin) Church became increasingly concerned by the violence and disorder caused by well-armed, mobile, mounted warriors across Western Europe. As a result, the papacy began to consider how the life of a knight might intersect with the Christian faith.

  William lived in a medieval world that was almost universally Christian, where many aspects of daily existence were informed by religious doctrine. The Latin Church taught that every human soul would be judged at the moment of death, and either rewarded for Christian purity with the joys of heavenly paradise, or condemned for sin through an eternity of hellish torment. The notion that transgressive behaviour endangered the spirit exerted a powerful influence over the society into which Marshal was born. Knights were particularly prone to anxiety, being forced by their profession to fight and shed blood, yet conscious that this violence was inherently sinful in the eyes of the Church. The Latin papacy and clergy made some attempts to control and condition the behaviour of the warrior class, but at first these enjoyed only limited success.

  In 1095, however, Pope Urban II alighted upon a potent idea: he issued a call to arms for a new form of holy war, in which Christian knights would redirect their aggression beyond the confines of Latin Europe, fighting instead to recover the sacred city of Jerusalem from Islam. When Urban proclaimed that participation in this expedition would actually earn spiritual merit, helping to cleanse the soul of sin, his words met with a rapturous response. Thousands of warriors set out for the Holy Land on this First Crusade, many of them – like Robert, duke of Normandy – drawn from the Anglo-Norman world. After long years of campaigning, and against all expectations, these crusaders achieved a near-miraculous victory in 1099.