1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (11 page)

The confident tone of medical textbooks is noteworthy, grounded on the assumption that most conditions can be treated without recourse to miracles or magic. And miracle stories themselves suggest that most people shared this confidence in doctors. No theme in them is more common than that the saint healed when doctors had failed – which indicates that people went to the doctors before they went on a pilgrimage.

We have completely remitted and pardoned to all any ill will, grudge and rancour that have arisen between us and our subjects
.

Magna Carta, Clause 62

T
he turbulent family life of the royal dynasty into which John was born would be familiar to viewers of television soap operas. Love, hatred and the desire for wealth or power are commonplace emotions, capable of complicating the lives of all families. The greater the wealth and power at stake the more intense the love and hatred is apt to be. The political successes and failures of John’s parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of his brother Richard the Lionheart, and of John himself were all, to a greater or lesser extent, bound up with sex, love and sibling rivalry.

Sex, love and war were the three great themes of the songs and romances of the age, of the stories on which John would have been brought up. The
fabliaux
treated sex with exuberantly bawdy humour. In one story a peasant is granted four wishes; when he allows his wife to have the first one, she wishes for him to be equipped with ‘extra pricks’ all over his body. Noblemen and noblewomen liked to think they were capable of finer feelings than this, of
fin amor
, usually referred to today as ‘courtly love’.

The fashionable poetry of courtly love occasionally celebrated the joys and sufferings of platonic love, the kind of love that theologians envisaged in paradise when, as they put it, ‘genital contact held no greater thrill than the clasp of a hand’. But far more frequently authors such as Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan) or the brilliant poetess Marie de France – who dedicated her songs to King Henry II – examined the pleasures and torments of sexual love, and of love in marriage, not just in adultery. In Marie’s lay
Milun
, the unnamed heroine falls in love with Milun and, because she expects to marry him, sleeps with him – indeed they have a child. It does not work out, she has to marry someone else, but they find ways of staying in touch, and years later, when her first husband dies, they are married ‘and lived happily ever after’. But it was not just writers of songs and romances who believed that there should be love in marriage. The English monk and chronicler Matthew Paris said that a married couple was joined by law, love and ‘the harmony of the bed’.

The medical science fashionable at the time taught that conception only occurred when male and female sperm coalesced, and that women produced sperm only as a result of pleasure. This was why, men said, prostitutes did not get pregnant. Christian theologians and moralists disapproved of anyone doing anything for the sake of pleasure, but it does not look as though their disapproval carried much weight, at any rate where sex was concerned. The earliest surviving records of archdeacons’ courts show that 90 per cent of the offences brought before them were sexual, mostly fornication. Thomas of Chobham, the author of a handbook for confessors (written around 1215), described fornication as ‘the vice of everyone and excused by many’. Gerald de Barri urged his readers not to listen to those who said that fornication, far from being a mortal sin, was only natural. But many did listen to those siren voices. Many couples lived in long-term non-marital relationships. Church synods urged fornicators to marry – or, if they would not, at least to pay a fine. Adultery was taken much more seriously. The recommended penance for adulterers was that they should be whipped naked through the streets. Thomas of Chobham allowed that a husband who found his wife in adultery had the right to castrate her lover, even in those cases where the lover was a clerk. On this matter both Church and royal courts were of one opinion.

But Daniel of Beccles would not have approved of such a violent response by the husband. In his view, women found it virtually impossible to resist any well-endowed male, so wives were almost bound to be unfaithful. ‘One sinful act with her lover’, he wrote, ‘will please a wife more than a hundred lawful times with her husband.’ Although he recognised the husband’s right in law to punish the adulterer, his advice to the civilised man was: pretend not to notice. ‘It is better to conceal your shame as a husband than disclose the evil that brings a blush to your cheek and grief to your heart.’ He advised husbands not to beat their wives. So far as he was concerned marriage was the relationship on which society was founded, and whatever your wife did, or however much you came to dislike her, you should put up with it.

Daniel also advised you on what to do if your lord’s wife made a pass at you. In his view it would end badly whether you accepted or spurned her advances. Your only hope was to pretend to be ill. And he pointed out that the stupidest thing you could possibly do was to tell your lord, out of loyalty to him, what his wife was up to. One of Henry II’s courtiers, Walter Map, tells a story similarly based on the male notion that female sexual appetites were boundless. In this case when the queen made a pass at one of her husband’s knights, he got out of this awkward spot by pretending to be gay. Which was fine – until the queen sent her serving-maid to test him out. The conventional male opinion that women were sexually voracious was doubtless the other side of the same coin as the equally conventional male opinion that when a woman said no she almost certainly meant yes.

The physicians who believed that pleasure was necessary for conception were also inclined to take a frank view of sex – disconcertingly so in the eyes of those churchmen who put a high value on celibacy. The anonymous author of a work known as the
Prose Salernitan Questions
wrote that nothing natural could be shameful and that only hypocrites shied away from discussing sexual intercourse. It seems clear that he was writing in the west of England around 1200 since he mentions five English physicians, three of whom have been traced in early thirteenth-century Hereford documents; indeed one of them, Master Hugh de Mapenore, became bishop of Hereford in 1216.

Doctors also reckoned that regular sex was good for your health. Long absence meant that crusaders were thought to be risking their lives in more ways than one if they remained faithful to their wives while they were away. According to Ambroise, the poet-historian of the Third Crusade,

John was born on Christmas Eve 1167 in the royal palace of Beaumont at Oxford. He was the youngest of eight, five boys, one of whom died young, and three girls, born to Henry and Eleanor in the first fifteen years of their marriage. His parents appear to have enjoyed the pleasure and harmony of their bed, and by this criterion at least their marriage had been a great success.

In a previous marriage lasting fourteen years, Eleanor had borne only two daughters. Her first husband, King Louis VII of France, had eventually decided that she was unlikely to bear the son he needed, and divorced her in 1152. For years before this the couple had been on bad terms. Eleanor was alleged to have had an eye for a handsome man, while Louis was deeply pious. He might have been influenced by those canon lawyers who taught that sex between spouses who had no affection for each other was a kind of adultery. In these circumstances it would not have been surprising that he should divorce Eleanor were it not for the fact that she was the heiress-duchess of Aquitaine. By divorcing her Louis risked losing a vast territory, roughly one-third of modern France, quite a high price to pay for a divorce.

In fact Louis VII belonged to the first generation of princes to face a new situation, one which created both great opportunities and awkward dilemmas. For the first time in European history women such as Eleanor, daughter of Duke William X of Aquitaine, were, if they had no brothers, inheriting counties, duchies and kingdoms. For this reason the twelfth century has been called the ‘century of heiresses’. Geoffrey of Anjou, known as ‘Plantagenet’, had married one such heiress, Matilda, King Henry I’s only surviving legitimate child, heiress to both England and Normandy. He had not got on at all well with Matilda, but chose to stay married to her. In previous centuries husbands had often repudiated their wives, but this was no longer an easy option for those who had married an heiress. When John was eight, Count Philip of Flanders, convinced that he had caught his wife in adultery, killed her alleged lover by hanging him upside down in a cess-pit. But his wife was the heiress to the rich county of Vermandois in north-eastern France, and he chose not to divorce her. By marrying Eleanor soon after her father died, Louis VII had enormously extended the territorial power of the king of France, but by 1152 the estrangement between him and Eleanor was so deep, and his desire for a son so great, that he chose divorce. Louis was not a ruthless man. He made no real effort to keep Eleanor under restraint either during or after the divorce proceedings. Eight weeks after the divorce she married Henry and transferred Aquitaine from her first husband to her second. This transformed the political shape of France overnight. Nominally Henry held his dominions in France as a subordinate of the king of France, but in reality he overshadowed him. Henry II was the most powerful king in Europe, richer even than the ruler of Germany, Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa.

The prevalent modern idea that marriage in the Middle Ages was just a matter of political expediency is nonsense. In a world dominated by dynasties the political consequences of sexual incompatibility and marriage breakdown could be devastating, as Louis discovered. Nearly all marriages were arranged on the basis of political calculation, but whether or not the couple remained married, and whether or not they had children, was at least as much a question of love and sex as it was of politics. Anyone who said that the association of love and marriage was merely an ecclesiastical or literary convention, an illusion which existed only in the dream world of poets or the spiritual world of theologians, was living in a dream world of their own, an illusory land of neat and tidy categories. The real world was much more complicated.

It was King John’s bad luck that in Philip II he had to face a king of France who was a devious politician, ruthlessly determined to overthrow the Plantagenet empire and take revenge for the humiliations that his father, Louis VII, had suffered at Henry II’s hands. But even so single-minded a ruler as Philip allowed his sexual problems to jeopardise his political ambitions. On 15 August 1193 he married Ingeborg, daughter of the king of Denmark. According to one French bishop, in beauty she was the equal of Helen of Troy. Next morning, however, Philip tried to return his wife to the custody of the Danish envoys who had escorted her to France. They refused to take her back. Philip and Ingeborg then fought a furious and prolonged legal battle over what had – or had not – happened during the one night they had spent together. Pope Innocent III told the king it would not be enough to give her the public status of a queen: he must also sleep with her, for ‘nothing could be more honourable or more holy’. Not until 1213, when Philip was planning to invade England and wanted to be sure that God would favour the enterprise, did he at last do the decent thing. According to his court historian, the news caused great joy throughout France. But for twenty years Philip’s political and diplomatic standing had been undermined by his attempt to secure a divorce that was recognised not just within his own kingdom – that was relatively easy – but also by the other ruling families of Europe.

Compared with how little we know about other families of the time, we are amazingly well informed about the family life of the Plantagenets. Young John must have learned early just how complicated family life could be. He was only five when, in 1173, his eldest brother Henry rebelled against their father. Young Henry found a willing ally in Louis VII of France, who was still smarting over the loss of Aquitaine. Astonishingly, Eleanor decided to join the revolt. She sent her next two sons, Richard and Geoffrey, aged fifteen and fourteen respectively, to join their brother at the court of her ex-husband in order to fight a war against her present husband. Why she did this is unknown and unknowable. We cannot see into her heart, and do not know whether she was jealous of a mistress or mistresses that Henry may by now have taken, or whether she was politically frustrated, or whether it was a combination of sex and politics. What is certain is that she was angry. Sons, often frustrated by having to wait too long – as they saw it – before being allowed a share of their father’s power, often rebelled. Henry understood this and was prepared to offer them terms. In his commentary on the revolt of 1173–4, the learned dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diss, searched back through history, and found more than thirty examples of rebellious sons. But for a wife to rebel against her husband was extraordinary. Ralph of Diss did not call a single case to mind. Eleanor must have been very angry indeed.