by Alan Ereira
. . . since you are angry at me without reason, you attack me harshly with, ‘Oh outrageous presumption! Oh excessively foolish pride! Oh opinion uttered too quickly and thoughtlessly by the mouth of a woman! A woman who condemns a man of high understanding and dedicated study . . .’
My answer: Oh man deceived by wilful opinion! . . . A simple little housewife sustained by the doctrine of Holy Church could criticize your error!*8
THE MALE BACKLASH
However, this age of semi-emancipation was not going to last. As what we call ‘the Middle Ages’ merged seamlessly into what we call ‘the Renaissance’ Europe seems to have been dominated by tyrannies and a new wave of militarism and barbarism. Perhaps as a corollary, many men resented and feared women playing prominent roles in society. The restraining hand of the queen as mediatrix was no longer seen as a political ideal. Men sought to push women back into the background.
As the economy recovered from the Black Death during the second half of the fourteenth century, a male backlash had begun to be tangible. In 1400 an ordinance from York declared that ‘henceforth no woman of whatever status or condition shall be put among us to weave . . . unless they have been taught the craft’. As women could not join guilds, that meant never. Other similar rules began to appear.
But, as usual, men found that the handiest weapon against women was religion and the clearest example of this came with the strange history of Joan of Arc. In 1429 Christine de Pisan wrote a poem of sheer delight as this remarkable woman led an army of national liberation through France (that was certainly how Christine saw it). But two years later Joan was in an English prison.
She had gone into battle wearing male costume; she kept it on in prison, the pants and tunic ‘firmly laced and tied together’, apparently as a defence against being raped by the soldiers guarding her. Although there were efforts to charge her with witchcraft and heresy these collapsed, and she was convicted for the crime of cross-dressing and nothing else. She had finally consented to wear a dress, but her jailers had taken it away and thrown her the old, forbidden male clothing. She eventually put it on, and was promptly declared to be a ‘relapsed heretic’ and condemned to death.
The fire in which Joan burned was just the beginning of a long process of changing not just the position of women, but the very perception of a woman’s nature. There was also a striking change in how noblewomen dressed. Instead of showing off a slim, boyish figure, fifteenth-century fashion was concerned with occupying space and moving sedately. A new kind of dress, a ‘houppeland’, with a deep V-neck, baggy sleeves and an enormous skirt seriously restricted women’s movements. Noblemen also wore houppelands as their bagginess was a demonstration of wealth and extravagance, but the male version was nothing like such an impediment.
Women had started to wear clothes that reduced them to rather helpless ornaments.
THE DRAGON BECOMES FEMALE
One extraordinary insight into the psychological background of these developments is provided by Dr Samantha Riches’s study of dragon pictures.*9
The story of St George and the dragon had been around since the twelfth century. It was said that this terrible beast had ravaged all the countryside around a town. It had such bad breath that it caused pestilence whenever it approached the town, so the people gave it two sheep every day to satisfy its hunger; and when they eventually ran out of sheep they decided to offer it human victims, chosen by drawing lots. Eventually the chosen victim was the king’s daughter. So the maiden, dressed as a bride, was led out and left to wait for the monster. St George happened to find her, bravely attacked the dragon and defeated it.
This tale became very popular in the fifteenth century. But something sinister was appearing in the story.
Dr Riches looked at late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century pictures depicting the tale and realized that in many of them dragons had female genitalia. This portrayal of the dragon as female and sexual is probably connected to fears about women’s sexuality during this time. The ‘damsel’ in the pictures is ‘saved’ by St George, who symbolizes chastity, from the dragon who symbolizes her own uncontrolled sexuality. Women’s sexuality was being associated with a monster, suggesting that this sexuality was seen as evil and threatening. St George was the patron saint of towns, and in towns that were actively legislating against women traders this view seems entirely possible.
What began in towns ended by dominating the country. When religious dissent developed it was the craftsmen and tradesmen of the towns who led it, and urban Protestantism would eventually take over England. Built into that Protestantism was a view of woman as the helpmeet, the obedient domestic creature who would now have to vow at her wedding to love, honour and OBEY. Women were not to be encouraged to play queenly roles, as John Knox made clear in 1558 in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, an attack on the very idea of women at the head of states. (‘Regiment’ meaning ‘government’.)
Things changed so much that in the eighteenth century the great English legal commentator Sir William Blackstone wrote:
The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage . . . for this reason a man cannot grant anything to his wife or enter into any covenant with her: for the grant would be to presuppose her separate existence, and to covenant with her would be only to covenant with himself.
All this was further compounded through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, by a belief that women were ornamental and men active, and then that women really had very little sex drive – that was a man thing. It would have been too frightening for a husband to leave his wife at home while he went off to work if she was actually thought to be randier than him. In fact, less than 100 years ago any woman who was ‘excessively’ interested in sex was deemed to be sick or mad, and in need of treatment. A large proportion of the women in mental asylums were there because they had had illegitimate babies; or simply because they enjoyed sex more than was thought proper.
And so we come to the Lady of Shalott, and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the damsel-in-distress. A Victorian invention, projected back in time, to hinder our understanding of the Middle Ages. Modern (male) scholars have argued that Héloïse’s letters to Abelard – ‘sweeter to me will always be the word lover, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore’ – must be male forgeries. No real woman, it came to be believed, could ever write, or even think, like that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KING
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
KINGS OF ENGLAND CAN BE DIVIDED into three types: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That, you can take it from us, is a reliable fact. But which is which is another matter.
Take all the kings of England called Richard: there’s Good King Richard I – Richard the Lionheart, the idealistic crusader and champion of England – or was he? Bad King Richard II – the vain, megalomaniac tyrant – or has his name been traduced by those who wished him ill? And Ugly King Richard III – the deformed monster of Shakespeare’s imagination – or is he nothing more than that: the product of our greatest playwright’s imagination?
History consists of the tales we like to tell each other about our predecessors. And every generation constructs its stories to suit its own outlook and agenda. In such shifting ground we can take nothing for granted. Even facts that seem to be set in stone – such as the roll-call of the kings of England or the ‘fact’ that the last invasion of England was in 1066 – are by no means as certain as we like to pretend.
THE UNMENTIONABLE KINGS OF ENGLAND
Take the kings nobody mentions; you might not have heard much about Osric and Eanfrith. In AD 633 they ruled two kingdoms that became Northumbria before they were killed by King Caedwalla of North Wales.
The only reason we know anything at all about these two kings is that Bede, writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation a hundred years later, mentions that no king-list records them:
To this day, that year is looke
d upon as unhappy, and hateful to all good men . . . Hence it has been agreed by all who have written about the reigns of the kings, to abolish the memory of those perfidious monarchs, and to assign that year to the reign of the following king, Oswald, a man beloved by God.
The same fate seems to have overtaken King Louis the First (and Last).
KING LOUIS THE FIRST (AND LAST?)
Louis invaded England in 1216 with a fleet almost as large as the Conqueror’s, and a considerably larger army. He landed unopposed and was hailed as king when he reached London. On 2 June the new ruler, heir to the crown of France, was welcomed by a magnificent Mass in St Paul’s Cathedral.*1 He received the homage of the citizens of London, of most of the barons and of the King of Scotland,*2 and began the conquest of the rest of the country as well as the government of the part which was under his control.
Louis ruled much of England with his own chancellor (the brother of the archbishop of Canterbury), and elevated at least one man to the nobility, creating Gilbert de Gant (or Gaunt) Earl of Lincoln. He was recognized as king by the barons and by the citizens of London, the Welsh nobles and the Scottish king. The fact that he doesn’t feature in the official king-lists raises some difficult questions about what exactly is meant by the expression ‘King of England’.
Louis had come to England because the barons had invited him to take the crown. King John had a long-standing feud with the Church over the appointment of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, which had led to him being excommunicated and an interdict – a ban on church services – being placed on the whole kingdom. In 1213 Pope Innocent III authorized Philip II of France to invade England and deprive John of his kingdom. John had not been next in line to the throne after Richard’s death: he had been crowned by the previous archbishop on the grounds that he was chosen by the nation, a choice confirmed by public acclamation.
Philip of France summoned a council and they all decided that his son Louis should lead the invasion and take over the English throne. Louis was married to John’s niece, which gave him some kind of claim.
The invasion did not take place for another three years, by which time John had first agreed to, and then reneged on, the Magna Carta, and the English barons and the archbishop had called on Louis to get on with it. John had taken the precaution of handing his kingdom over to the pope, which meant that his excommunication and the interdict were lifted and it was the barons and bishops who found themselves excommunicated for attacking the pope’s kingdom of England. They were not hugely bothered; so far as they were concerned, John had lost his right to the throne by surrendering the country to another ruler.
Louis and his army landed in England, on the Isle of Thanet, on 21 May 1216. He claimed the throne through his wife and by the choice of the barons.
This is how Louis the First and Last came to be acclaimed as King of England. It is true that no bishop crowned him, and that meant he was in an unusual position, but he was certainly ruling as king. John’s attempt to win his country back involved wide-ranging war. In October he set off northwards from Lynn in Norfolk and lost all his baggage, including the Crown jewels, when his entourage took a short cut across the river Well and just as the tide came in. No-one would ever see it again. John was devastated and went to the Cistercian abbey of Swineshead in Lincolnshire to be consoled. The original austerity of the Cistercians had obviously already evaporated; John surfeited himself with peaches and a kind of new beer, caught dysentery and died.
That left Louis the only king in England. He also happened to be the only adult male with any claim to inherit the throne (though only through his marriage). John had left a nine-year-old son – the future Henry III – but no child had ever been allowed to become the ruler of England. This did not worry the papal legate, who invented an entirely new rule of succession. He whistled Henry down to Gloucester, where the few barons who had stuck by John attended a makeshift coronation performed by the bishop of Winchester – the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London had prior engagements. A circlet of gold was hurriedly found and plonked on the boy’s head. God Save the King.
However, as it turned out Louis did not endear himself to the English barons as he evidently preferred to govern with the help of Frenchmen. William Marshal, the doughty hero of tournaments long ago, now aged 75 and titled the Earl of Pembroke, took the job of regent and set about getting rid of Louis – which he evidently did with his customary efficiency. The great battle came at Lincoln on 20 May 1217; Louis lost and his troops began to drift away. A few months later he gave up. In September 1217 a treaty was signed by which he surrendered his castles, released his subjects from their oaths to him and told his allies to lay down their arms. Everyone who had been on Louis’ side swore fealty to Henry III, and Louis went home to succeed to the crown of France, a much more secure job with better prospects – though he died three years after inheriting it.
KING WHO?
Eventually, in 1220, Henry was given a proper coronation at Westminster. And, in order to make it possible for the kingdom to carry on functioning, everyone who had sworn fealty to Louis realized that they had not really done so at all. It had never happened. There had never been a King Louis of England.
The history books would say what the new government wanted them to say, justifying rebellion against the tyrant John while glossing over the barons’ brief importation of a French king. They still do. Which means, of course, that history books need to be regarded with a very jaundiced eye. Most of what we now know of King John comes from a handful of accounts of his reign, written by churchmen who were either outraged by his excommunication or living under the post-Louis government;*3 they were enthusiasts for trying to weaken royal power. Later historians simply copied and embellished their manuscripts.
THE POWER OF KINGS
This pattern, of chroniclers under new regimes blackening the memory of the old, created an image of medieval kingship that was to resonate through English history, in which the king was a tyrant whose whimsical and self-serving power needed to be tamed. Bad King John was the first of these tyrant kings, and centuries later this view of royal authority was enshrined by historians in the service of Britain’s constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century and the American War of Independence. This is why the Magna Carta, a document that dealt with the very specific grievances of John’s tenants-in-chief, was mythologized into the foundation stone of English and American government.
Sir Edward Coke, England’s most prominent seventeenth-century lawyer and one of Parliament’s leaders in the run-up to the Civil War, used a reinterpreted Magna Carta as a weapon against Charles I, arguing that even kings must comply with common law. He stated in Parliament that ‘Magna Carta . . . will have no sovereign’. His arguments were later to be used by Thomas Jefferson, in setting out the idea of English liberties.
It was easy for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, enthusiasts for ‘constitutional monarchy’ or a republic, to mine the old histories and find material that allowed them to depict kings as tyrants. Each time a regime changed it was necessary for the new authorities to show how grateful everyone should be that they had removed the previous incumbent. This involved replacing historical figures with caricatures of wickedness.
Perhaps royal power, and its use or misuse, was more of an issue in England than in other countries because an English king was in a very different position from, for example, a king of France. In France, the monarchy was relatively weak and the great aristocrats ruled their own territories on their own terms. These aristocrats included kings of England, who held land in France not by virtue of their English crown but as dukes of French provinces, such as Normandy and Anjou – which is why the French were constantly fighting the English. Such powerful, independent nobles simply did not exist in England.
There had always been an elective character to European kingship (the idea that the eldest son automatically inherits the crown started in England, as part of the politics surro
unding the installation of the young Henry III). Even conquering rulers like Cnut (Canute, the Danish king who ruled England from 1017 to 1035) were elected, in Cnut’s case first by the Danish fleet and eventually by the Anglo-Saxon Witan (great council). This meant that kingship was something given by others and could, at least in theory, be withdrawn.
1066 changed all that. The terms of English kingship were set, inevitably, by William the Conqueror, and it was a new kind of kingship – authority based on might alone. His coronation did not require the approval of his subjects. William achieved what no other European ruler could: the effective conquest of his whole kingdom. What mattered was not the Battle of Hastings but the warfare that followed. He enforced his authority at Exeter, at York, carried out the savage ‘harrying of the North’, ravaged Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire and crushed revolt in the Fens. Having established total mastery, and installed his own men as tenants throughout the country, he carried out a complete survey of the whole package down to the last slave and plough – Domesday Book – and insisted that every tenant, all the way down the feudal chain, swear an oath of personal allegiance to him.
No king could more completely own his kingdom than William owned England. And it was his to give to whichever son he fancied. That, of course, became the problem as soon as he died. William Rufus, to whom he bequeathed the country, was soon killed as the result of an ‘accident’ that put his younger brother Henry on the throne.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. John of Worcester’s chronicle, written in about 1140, soon after Henry I’s death, describes the king having nightmares about complaining peasants and violent barons. It was, in fact, all falling apart. And then it did.
Henry approached his deathbed with no living legitimate son (he did not regard any of his 25 or so illegitimate children as king material). He willed the kingdom to his daughter Matilda, and forced his barons to swear allegiance to her, but once he was dead his nephew Stephen claimed the crown and England was plunged into anarchic civil war. It was a time when, as one chronicler described it, ‘Christ and his angels slept’.