Even so, twelfth-century tournaments were not really designed with spectators in mind. Some did attend events, but they were relatively few and far between; peering from the edge of the field, occasionally accommodated in rudimentary stands. Only once, at a contest much later in Marshal’s career, did the History mention a group of noble-born ladies in attendance. For William, then, the tournament was no grand gladiatorial combat waged before a feverish throng; nor was it the formal joust of the later Middle Ages, performed within a contained arena for the entertainment of the crowd. For simple, practical reasons, early tournaments provided few thrills for onlookers. The preliminaries and the first grand charge were certainly worth a look, but after that, once the mêlée fragmented, the fighting moved out into the open landscape and was impossible to follow. In Marshal’s day the critical audience did not stand outside the action looking in, they participated themselves. The key witnesses to all of this dazzling skill, manly daring and ostentatious pageantry were other knights. It was these peers who would stand testament to a warrior’s worth, validating his achievements and broadcasting his fame.
The ideal of chivalry
The History’s account of the Sainte Jamme tournament contained one additional, seemingly minor, observation. In this tiny, incidental detail, the binding mechanic of the medieval tournament is glimpsed, and, by turns, a tantalising window opens on to the mental and moral landscape of William Marshal’s thought world. The History recorded that after William snatched Philip of Valognes’ bridle and dragged him from the field, ‘Philip readily gave his pledge to the Marshal’ and, trusting him, William ‘let him go’. Philip had promised that, when the reckoning came at day’s end, he would settle any ransom or forfeit due, and his word alone was deemed sufficient. Both men shared a deeply ingrained understanding that they had to honour the rules of this game; that by social and cultural convention, any failure to do so would be regarded as shameful. Such a transgression would cause disgrace and a loss of status, not only for the individual, but also for his retinue and kin.
In William’s day, the ‘chevaliers’ or knights who understood and observed these customs were following the principles of ‘chevalerie’ – chivalry. In a literal sense, they knew how horsemen should act. These precepts might be bent, even manipulated, to one’s advantage, but to be seen to break them openly would be to invite scandal and ignominy. The idea that knights ought to adhere to a higher code of conduct had been gradually percolating through Western society since the eleventh century. Embryonic notions of chivalry were stimulated and shaped by a wide array of interlocking forces, from Christian theology and the emergence of crusading and the Military Orders, to Western Europe’s deepening fascination with the myth-history of knighthood. But it was on the tournament field that such concepts came into ever sharper focus, and from the mid-twelfth century onwards these war games were both the catalyst and the cauldron of chivalric ideals. It is no accident that at precisely this moment, authors of popular chivalric fiction began to write of Arthurian heroes like Lancelot fighting at tournaments.
For William and his contemporaries, chivalry was a rather loosely defined set of customs and expectations – a kind of collective sensibility – chiefly concerned with regulating conduct between knights and with establishing what obligations lords and knights owed to one another. As yet, ‘chivalrous’ knights showed little interest in wider social responsibilities; they were certainly not egalitarian upholders of justice or protectors of the poor. It would be decades before these rules became more clearly defined and delineated, and almost two centuries before the traditions of chivalry were refined and encoded in works like Le livre de chevalerie (The Book of Chivalry), authored by the famed fourteenth-century knight Geoffrey of Charny. By this time, foolish warriors might undertake acts of extraordinary folly in pursuit of these heightened chivalric ideals. In the 1330s, for example, a number of English knights went to war against France wearing eye patches, having sworn to ladies at court that they would not open one of their eyes until victory was achieved. Needless to say, thus encumbered, most died as a result.
William Marshal’s career
William seems to have spent the next year, perhaps even longer, travelling around the tournament circuit, operating increasingly as something akin to a free agent, though still sporting the colours of Tancarville. His fortunes varied. At an event held between St Brice and Bouère, to the south-west of Le Mans, Marshal was set upon by a group of five knights all intent on bludgeoning him into submission. ‘They manhandled him terribly’, according to the History, ‘turning the helmet on his head by force from back to front’, and though William eventually managed to break free, the reversed helm covering his face meant he was now riding blind and all but suffocating. The battered helmet proved so difficult to dislodge that Marshal badly sliced one of his fingers ripping it off and was gasping for air by the time he had freed his head. At a later tournament, he was captured by the Flemish knight Matthew of Wallincourt and had to forfeit one of his warhorses. William paid his ransom, but tried to persuade Wallincourt to show leniency by releasing his destrier – seemingly on the grounds that he was still just a young, inexperienced knight – but Matthew flatly refused. Marshal would remember this slight for decades to come. Despite these setbacks, on the whole William seems to have prospered. His biographer observed that through this period ‘he led such a very fine life that many were jealous of him’, adding that his fame began to spread through France.
Modern historians have typically indentified this period, in the mid-to late 1160s, as the start of William’s abiding love affair with the knightly tournament. It has recently been suggested that, by 1170, William was already ‘one of the most accomplished and devoted of the tournament champions of his day’. In fact, the evidence suggests that, for now, Marshal’s engagement with the tournament scene was actually more intermittent. The clearest indication of this fact was his decision, either in late 1167 or early 1168, to return to England for the first time in nearly eight years. William was no longer the penniless supplicant seeking the favour of his elder brother John. He came home, instead, as a man of some reputation and independent means. But in doing so, he was turning his back on the tournament circuit, because these knightly contests had been banned in England by King Henry II for being too disruptive to the peace of the realm. Marshal was looking to take the next step in his career – to gain experience of real warfare. He soon learnt to his cost that it did not always conform to the chivalric etiquette of the tournament.
KNIGHT PROTECTOR
With favourable winds, William crossed the Channel without difficulty and rode straight for the West Country. According to the History, he returned to England ‘because that was the country of his birth and because he wished to see his worthy kin’. But there is no evidence that William made any effort to visit the surviving members of his immediate family at this point, nor does he seem to have paid his respects to his late father, now interred at Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire.* Marshal had a different kind of family encounter in mind; one that had little to do with sentimentality or emotion, but was driven by the far more pragmatic pursuit of patronage. He made straight for Salisbury, seat of his powerful uncle, Earl Patrick – a man who had thrived in the aftermath of the civil war, enjoying advancement under the new king, and one who now retained the services of fifty to sixty knights.
William’s brief, bitter taste of life as an impoverished, lord-less warrior in 1166 had left its mark. He had no intention of risking such a fate again. His burgeoning martial reputation might have earned him a position in any number of military households across Normandy and England, but a more permanent post could only be cemented through a close family bond. Earl Patrick was no sibling and potential rival, like Marshal’s brother John. He was an established noble; a man of prospects, capable of acting as William’s mentor, of shaping and advancing his career. When Patrick duly offered him a position in the Salisbury mesnie, a flourishing future looked certain. Shortly th
ereafter, the wisdom of William’s decision to seek service with his uncle was amply borne out. In early 1168 Earl Patrick was called to campaign in south-western France, at the side of King Henry II himself. Marshal had already met one monarch, King Stephen, as a child hostage. Now he was to be drawn to the centre of the new Angevin dynasty.
The Angevin dynasty
In the first decade following his coronation in 1154, Henry II proved himself to be an astute, dynamic and unfailingly ambitious ruler. Royal authority in England was quickly re-established, as Henry and his diligent officials reconstructed systems of law, justice and governance. Control over the minting of coinage was reasserted, while the determined enforcement of crown rights and strict imposition of taxation soon restocked the royal treasury. Impressively, all of this was achieved while holding on to Normandy and Anjou, and expanding Angevin influence into Brittany, in the far north-western corner of France. Throughout this period, Henry was able to rely on the steadying hand of his mother, Empress Matilda, who lived in semi-retirement near Rouen until her death in September 1167. But Henry II’s power, the extent of his realm and the course of his reign were also defined by his marriage to another remarkable woman: Eleanor of Aquitaine.
In the words of one contemporary, Eleanor was ‘a woman without compare’ – strong-willed, sharp-minded and driven by a lust for life. Frustratingly, no chronicler gave any hint of her physical appearance, even though many described her husband Henry in detail. By birth she was heiress to the great duchy of Aquitaine, with lands stretching across western and south-western France, and dominion over the cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux. Eleanor’s colourful career began long before she met Henry. In 1137, at around the age of fifteen, she was wed to King Louis VII of France, head of the royal Capetian dynasty. This seemed an advantageous union, promising as it did to unite the small French kingdom centred around Paris with the lands of Aquitaine, but Eleanor appears to have felt little warmth for her rather unprepossessing husband – a man whom she later likened to a monk because of his desultory sexual appetite.
In the late 1140s, Eleanor and Louis travelled to the Holy Land during the disastrous Second Crusade, but in Syria the queen was accused of having an incestuous affair with her uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, ruler of the principality of Antioch. Eleanor brazened it out, refusing to be cowed, but the scandalous story spread across Europe. The gravest problem, however, was that the royal marriage failed to secure the Capetian line; two healthy daughters were born to the couple, but no male heir. Eventually, in 1152, the union was annulled on grounds of consanguinity, seemingly by mutual consent. Just eight weeks later – and much to Louis VII’s horror – Eleanor married the more vigorous Henry of Anjou and Normandy, a man twelve years her junior, and an arch-rival of the Capetians. When Henry became king of England two years later, a vast new Angevin realm was created, with lands stretching from the borders of Scotland in the north to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.
For the first fifteen years, Henry and Eleanor’s marriage flourished, as a veritable bumper crop of heirs was born. The couple’s first child, William, died at the age of just three, but seven more children followed, all of whom survived to adulthood. The boy who became the Angevins’ primary male heir was born on 28 February 1155 and christened Henry; three further sons – Richard, Geoffrey and John – and three daughters – Matilda, Eleanor and Joanne – came after. King Henry II was delighted. With this brood he could found an enduring dynasty and forge a web of diplomatic alliances through marriage, safeguarding Angevin interests.
Ruling such a huge and diverse empire presented formidable challenges. Chief among these was the enduring and embittered enmity of the Capetians, so recently inflamed by Henry’s marriage to Eleanor. King Louis VII was born of a long-established royal line, but in terms of territory, wealth and military might, he inherited a relatively feeble kingdom. Centuries earlier, under the Carolingians, Francia or France had been a unified realm, but it had long ago fractured into numerous dukedoms and counties. The French monarchy retained only a small territory known as the Ile-de-France, with the city of Paris at its heart, and though the king was the nominal overlord of all the surrounding provinces, in practice his power was eclipsed by many of his supposed vassals.
The most irritating of all of these, as far as the Capetians were concerned, were the upstart dukes of Normandy, whose territory bordered the Ile-de-France to the west. These belligerent Normans posed a constant threat, not least because they claimed rights to a series of strategically significant frontier fortresses, barely forty miles from Paris, in an area known as the Vexin. Over the preceding century the abiding sense of hostility between the two sides had only deepened as the Norman dukes added the kingdom of England to their lands, and then, under the Angevins, the regions of Anjou, Maine, and most recently, Aquitaine. By the 1160s, the Angevins were unquestionably the dominant power in France. But King Louis had ambitions to restore the glory of the French monarchy, and Henry II knew only too well that his rival would seek to challenge, diffuse and deflect the might of the Angevins at every turn. The festering animosity between these two dynasties would simmer over the decades to come. As this contest intensified, it would come to shape the histories of England and France, and William Marshal would one day find himself fighting in the frontline of this titanic conflict.
As overlord of the grand Angevin realm, Henry II had also to overcome the massive hurdle of scale. He sought to govern an expansive ‘empire’ that stretched almost 1,000 miles from end to end without recourse to the complex infrastructure that we now take for granted in the modern world – the systems that allow expeditious transport and immediate communication. Henry’s solution was to remain almost constantly on the move, travelling incessantly from one province to the next, and he quickly became renowned for his restless, and seemingly inexhaustible, energy. To contemporaries, Henry was a man who never sat ‘except to eat or ride a horse’, the equivalent of a ‘human chariot dragging all after him’. He set a relentless pace for his itinerant court, covering in one day what it took others four to travel, and leaving one chronicler to conclude that ‘he must fly rather than journey by horse or ship’.
The first phase of Henry II’s reign was extraordinarily successful. Only two lingering problems threatened in the late 1160s. The king had become estranged from his former confidant and chancellor, Thomas Becket, after the latter’s appointment in 1162 as archbishop of Canterbury, England’s supreme prelate. Henry had expected his old friend Thomas to be a loyal and malleable ally, but Becket became a staunch defender of the Church against the predatory crown, seemingly inspired by his elevation. After a venomous quarrel, Thomas Becket went into exile in France in 1164, gaining the support of King Louis VII. Despite the papacy’s attempts to effect a reconciliation, the dispute remained unresolved.
The other pressing issue demanding Henry II’s attention was the unruly duchy of Aquitaine. The king spent part of 1167 reaffirming Angevin rule in the region, but in early 1168 news of a fresh uprising reached his ears. Determined to tame this valuable corner of France, the king laid plans for a new campaign to the south. Queen Eleanor would join the expedition, while Patrick of Salisbury was to be Henry’s leading lieutenant. The earl duly crossed the Channel at the head of his military retinue with his newly appointed household knight and nephew, William Marshal, at his side.
IN THE WILD LAND OF AQUITAINE
The Aquitanian expedition took William Marshal far from home. Up to this point his life had been lived in southern England and Normandy, regions that, in the twelfth century, shared a strong affinity in terms of language, culture and landscape. Aquitaine was a different world. In its southern reaches they even spoke another tongue – not the French (or Langue d’Œuil) that William had grown up with, but Occitan (or Langue d’Oc). This huge province – the size of Normandy and Anjou combined – was one of the wealthiest areas of France: a land of rich soils, golden crops and fine wines.
Its people cherished culture
and the arts, fostering new forms of music, poetry and song. Queen Eleanor’s own grandfather, Duke William IX, had been one of the first troubadours, or courtly singers, and it was not uncommon for local lords to be acclaimed both as warriors and composers. This was the world of mythic chivalry, from which the Carolingian heroes of old had supposedly marched to holy war against the Muslims of Spain. Local churches claimed to house the body of Roland himself and the very horn with which he had sought to summon aid against the Moors, while one of King Henry’s own favoured shrines – the cliff-top church of Rocamadour – displayed Roland’s legendary sword, Durendal.
Aquitaine’s ducal capital, Poitiers, was the most astounding city that William Marshal had ever seen. Perched upon a plateau, dominating the surrounding landscape, it was home to a formidable stone walled palace built on the orders of Queen Eleanor’s grandfather, and boasted two famous churches. One, dedicated to Poitiers’ fourth-century bishop St Hilary, was closely linked with the dukes of Aquitaine. The other, Notre-Dame la Grande, was a late eleventh-century masterpiece, decorated with some of the finest Romanesque sculpture in France. Not content with these architectural riches, Henry and Eleanor had decided to leave their own mark, commissioning a massive new cathedral dedicated to St Peter in 1162. The construction of this edifice had begun, so the city’s lower slopes were a building site, and the work would continue for decades to come.
The Greatest Knight Page 9